Acceptance in Life

Practicing Acceptance in Life: A Mindfulness Technique

Acceptance is a mindfulness technique that I practice with and teach to my clients. Essentially, acceptance is about learning how to live in harmony with conditions that we cannot change, rather than expending a great deal of energy struggling with anger and resistance when things surprise us or don't go our way.

Using the strategy of acceptance in life to deal with depression
and anxiety is a technique that is helpful for people who suffer from
unhappiness of any kind.

Our goal with acceptance of reality is to learn to engage and cooperate with reality and say to ourselves " This is the way things are right now." Instead of " I can't stand the way things are right now and I won't allow it."

I like this
quote and believe it is helpful in illustrating this idea of acceptance, the way we use it in therapy.

“Acceptance
is observation of life and suspension of judgment about whether what is
happening is good or bad,right or wrong.”

Ron Smotherman

Anytime you are in a state of
struggle against reality, or you are harshly judging an experience, you create distress and cloud your
problem solving ability.

Dropping judgement assists you in being able to eventually
evaluate situations and also to make decisions about how to handle them
effectively.

Evaluating situations, actions, feelings, or thoughts as "good or bad" and "right or wrong" often triggers feelings of guilt and shame or conflict that are
overwhelming.

The use of
acceptance is a strategy of changing your oppositional reaction to situations that are
unchangeable in the moment, to one that is less resistant. Some other ways to describe acceptance are: not arguing with reality, dropping the struggle with what is, or dropping resistance to your experience.

Acceptance of emotions is a truly powerful thing. We often have no idea how much judgement of our emotional state exacerbates the difficulty of our experience. If you are angry, sad and anxious, and you resist it and judge yourself, it will take much longer for you to return to a balanced and calm state.

Please click here for a form I use with my clients to help them with acceptance strategies when they are stuck. An image of page one of the form is shown below.

What does it mean to not argue with reality?

Not arguing with reality is, essentially, not causing yourself more distress when something is happening or has happened that you don’t like.

Some examples of non acceptance are focusing on thinking how:

Someone or something shouldn’t be the way it is (including yourself)

You shouldn't feel or think a certain way

You or someone else should or shouldn’t have done something in the past

This focus in your thinking generates anger, jealousy, insecurity, and unhappiness. Also, it does not help you to solve relationship or life problems, but causes you to get stuck in an emotional state that is not comfortable.

When you are in a state of non acceptance, you get stuck in the place of resistance rather than being able to problem solve effective ways to deal with things.

Acceptance in Life: Non Acceptance and How it Keeps us Stuck

Let's use eating as an example to explore acceptance versus non acceptance

Non acceptance

You ate a chocolate bar last night even though you were on a diet. You focus on how you shouldn’t have eaten a chocolate bar last night. That stirs up feelings of guilt and shame about emotional eating. You can easily get stuck there rather than moving on.

You say to yourself : "Why did I do that? I shouldn't have! What's wrong with me? Why won't I ever make a good food decision? I am bad and my eating habits are wrong. I'm never going to be successful at this diet"

This way of responding is likely to lead to unhappiness and failure.

Acceptance

You ate a chocolate bar last night even though you were on a diet.

You acknowledge that you ate the chocolate bar and you can't un-eat the chocolate bar. It is something that you don’t want to happen in the future, because you are trying to be healthy. This nonjudgmental accepting way to approach your feelings will enable you to get curious about the problem and what led to the chocolate bar eating incident so that next time you can make a different choice.

Lets use traffic as an example to explore acceptance versus non acceptance

Non Acceptance

Let’s say you are sitting in traffic. You did not anticipate the traffic and you will now be late to work. You become agitated and angry in such a situation. You may say in your head over and over how it shouldn’t be the way it is or how you should have done something differently to avoid the traffic. You may work yourself up into and angry and agitated state, at others or at yourself for your perceived failure to predict and outsmart the traffic.

In this situation, how will you feel? Likely angry, depressed, worried, distressed, stressed or even guilty. Yet you haven’t changed the fact that you are stuck in traffic.

Acceptance

In this same situation, practicing acceptance would like something like saying to your self " I don't like this, but it is the way it is.I'm stuck in traffic. There's no way I am going to get there on time. I may as well strategize a way for it to not happen next time, and also enjoy the moment by listening to some music or making a phone call to a friend."

If you can practice acceptance, you reduce the stress that you cause yourself ( in the form of your thoughts and insistence that things be other than how they are).

It’s a subtle difference between acknowledging and moving forward, or getting stuck in resistance or non acceptance.

Acceptance is not giving up

Some people confuse acceptance with giving up. Acceptance is not resignation. Acceptance does not mean that you just “ accept” that you are overweight, or in an unhappy marriage, or depressed. It merely means that you honestly appraise the situation and stop expending all your energy insisting it should be different when it isn’t.

Marsha Linehan uses the example of a car to illustrate the concept. If you go to a mechanic because your brakes have been squeaking and not working correctly and the mechanic says you need new brakes, what would happen if you spent the entire time insisting it shouldn’t be the case? Well, likely you would get in a car accident!

The concept of acceptance in life really functions the same way, even though we can’t see quite so clearly how it holds us back. Acceptance helps us drop the resistance and unskillful feelings that can keep us trapped. It then helps us move to a logical place of making a skillful decision about how to solve something in our lives that is not working.

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